Note: Webinar events do not have the feature of breakout rooms, as these events only have 1 regular session type. If you want your event to have breakout rooms then talk with your CSM about turning your event into a Virtual event or a Hybrid event.
Breakout rooms are an alternative to pushing attendees to your Rooms tab. With this feature, rather than moving attendees to the Rooms tab where they select a room to enter themselves, you are sending them directly into a preassigned room to network with other attendees or have a small group discussion.
PLEASE NOTE: To create randomized breakout rooms, where you push attendees into random groups created live inside the event, read this doc instead.
A few other things that you should know about breakout rooms:
- Creating preassigned breakout rooms must be triggered manually during the event when you're ready to send attendees to their small groups. To pre-assign people to breakout rooms, you will need to create a CSV file ahead of time to upload at the time of the event. More on this a bit later!
- The breakout rooms tab in the event will only appear after you have sent attendees to these rooms. Once you end the breakout room session, this tab will disappear.
- Only those who have been assigned to a breakout room will see this tab. Any attendee not on the preassigned list will not know that these breakout sessions are occurring. You must also include speakers and organizers on the pre-assigned list, or else they will not see the Breakouts tab or be able to enter a room.
Starting and Ending Pre-Assigned Breakout Rooms
Login to your control room panel (reach out to your customer success manager for help accessing this).
Click "Upload Preassigned CSV".
The file must be saved as a .csv file. In the file, column A is the room number, Column B is the attendee, speaker, or organizer email address. When formatting the CSV, do not include headers. Row 1 should be the first attendee's information.
After this pre-assigned list is uploaded, click "Create Breakout Session."
Now select the radio button next to the "Preassigned" option. When you are ready to open the rooms and redirect attendees into them, click "Create Breakouts" at the bottom of the popup window.
Attendees will then receive a notification on their screen and can either accept the invite to join their breakout room, or ignore the invitation. At this time, a tab called "Breakouts" will also appear in your event. Only attendees invited to the breakouts will see this tab.
If an attendee ignores the notification to join this breakout room initially, they are still able to click into the breakout rooms tab to join their pre-assigned room.
When attendees do click to join their breakout room, they will see a screen where they are able to see what they look like on camera prior to joining the room. They will then click the button reading "I'm Ready" prior to entering the room.
When you are ready to end breakout rooms, go back to your control room and click "End Current Breakout Session."
